3 Body Problem

"3 Body Problem" held my attention longer than most T. V. series. It's a mysterious sci-fi with enough moving parts to keep you guessing, but not so many as to keep you totally confused. Some of the world's smartest scientists were killing themselves and no one knew why. The most significant information we had as viewers was a terrestrial satellite in China that was being run by a physicist named Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao) roughly fifty years ago, and separately, a super-advanced VR headset being used by a physicist named Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) and a rich guy named Jack Rooney (John Bradley) in the present day. It was all mysterious, awesome, and unnerving. Some very unexplainable events were happening that had even the most preeminent minds baffled.

I thought "3 Body Problem" was great as long as they didn't go too deep into the interpersonal relationships. That kills shows for me unless that's what the shows purport to be from the beginning. If I'm watching a sci-fi, I want sci-fi; if I'm watching an action film, I want action, etc. I want the interpersonal drama to be as limited as possible. Give me what I need in order to know the personality of each character then pivot off of it into the matter at hand. I think shows that spend too much time on personal drama and relationship drama are wasting valuable time. I feel like they do that to fill space which is a sure fire way to make me checkout.

"3 Body Problem" largely stayed away from the interpersonal drama until episodes seven and eight. It was as if they ran out of steam a bit and needed content. I don't know where "3 Body Problem" goes after season one, but I think they have enough momentum to go far so long as they don't get in their own way.

Netflix.

I went into this completely blind--never read the books or saw the Chinese version, and only knew it was a sci-fi show by the guys from GoT. So I had no expectations. I thought it was good, but something was missing that kept it from being great.

The production was good, but not inspiring. The acting was good, but I never really felt emotionally connected to the characters, although I came close with Jin. It would have been nice to have more background and world building to become more vested in the story and characters.

The plot itself was fine enough, but events seemed to unfold quite quickly without ever showing any effort. A lot happened, but it lacked depth. I thought it was good enough to watch another season, but it didn't really knock my socks off at any point. Good enough, I suppose.

First two episodes are confusing but in an good way. Show builds op strong for me. Episode 3, 4 and 5 very strong.

But then, from like episode 5 the focus shifts to the most annoying character i have witnessed in a long time: Auggie.

I dont know if it is a bad actress or a good one and Auggie is ment to be this annoying but is a very hard watch.

At some point you just want to skip every scene she is in. I have still one episode left and my god i hope the character is written off.

So now I have 98 words left to typ but i just wanded to express my hate for this character nothing more. Finished.

I've been looking forward to 3 Body Problem for what feels like a decade. I just binged the entire first season in two days and it's everything I hoped it would be and more. This series is adapted from the best selling novels of the same name. It's a show that will pull you into their world and not let go. There are so many mysteries that will keep your mind going the entire time. You can tell they put a lot of money into this show too because the visuals are absolutely beautiful. The only thing that could've been better was character development. I stole this quote from a review I read but I couldn't agree more, "3 Body Problem sets a new standard for what sci-fi is capable of." I'm already looking forward to next season. It can't come fast enough.

At the time of this writing the show has a 7.9 rating. I suspect in time this will go down to around 7.2 although personally I think it deserves a 6.

Too harsh? I don't think so. While I didn't hate the show and am not one of those people who need or expect all adaptations to adhere strictly to the source material I think if you are going to make changes in your adaptation they should make sense and make some sort of improvement. This show failed on both scores. The original books by author Cixin Liu were hard sci-fi and brilliant in scope and imagination. The adaptation dumbs down the source material for TV and makes changes to appease the political viewers. None of this is an improvement. All it achieves is it takes everything that made the books so different from everything else out there and turns it into the same kind of Hollywood tripe that's a dime a dozen these days.